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Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi Books

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“To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this: 1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason. 2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right. 3. Charity is immoral. 4. Pay for your own fucking schools.”

PhilosophyCynicismObjectivismAyn Rand
Book:Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
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“No voter wants to believe he doesn’t really matter, so he buys into the idea that there are two substantively different parties frantically competing for his attention, the ideological fate of the country hanging on his decision every few years. It flatters the average citizen to think that way. The reality is that the dominant characteristic of our political system is the unchanging nature of the political consensus—while the two parties agree about most all of the important things, they disagree violently about the inconsequential stuff, providing the fodder and the drama for an endless political “struggle” that plays itself out in entertaining fashion every couple of years.”

ExtremismPolarizationPolitics Observation
Book:The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
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“The similarities between both of these groups were striking and should be clear to anyone who reads this book. Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side; the Christians seldom distinguished between Islamic terrorism and, say, Al Gore–style environmentalism, while the Truthers easily believed that reporters for the Washington Post, the president, and the front-line operators of NORAD were equally capable of murdering masses of ordinary New York financial-sector employees. Abandoned by the political center, both groups ascribed unblinkingly to a militant, us-against-them worldview, where only their own could be trusted. What made them distinctly American was that, while actually the victims of an obvious, unhidden conspiracy of corrupt political power, they chose to battle bugbears that were completely idiotic, fanciful, and imaginary”

ExtremismPolarizationPolitics Observation
Book:The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
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“At the tail end of the Reagan years the Democratic Party, with the aid of Clinton/Gore–led groups like the Democratic Leadership Council, presented us with a new kind of “business-friendly” Democrat, one who voted the right way on choice and minority rights but was “willing to work with business” on such matters as free trade, deregulation, privatization, government spending, and personal debt. Such a Democrat, we were told, could win: we’d be giving up a thing or two in terms of workers’ rights and other matters, but at least Roe v. Wade would be safe for now.”

PoliticsSocial IssuesDemocratsCentrism
Book:The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
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“In my experience conservatives hate reporters mainly because they see us as phonies. We reject the idea that we belong to a class, or that we have our own tribal beliefs. Sometimes the hypocrisy is something they’ve seen—upper-class liberals, railing about racism in the heartland from the comfort of an all-white suburban town, where they occasionally tip a Puerto Rican gardener or hire a Republican plumber. But a lot of it has to do with approach and tone, the way we openly write for and celebrate professional-sect audiences, unlike the columnists of the past, the Mike Roykos or Jack Newfields, who were unembarrassed to write in the language of the working person.”

MediaJournalismConservatives
Book:Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another
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“The next little thing about this vote-for-the-lesser-evil trick, of course—and this is no secret to anyone anymore—is that it drives all the “serious” candidates toward what is commonly referred to as the “moderate center,” even if these serious candidates aren’t, in fact, moderate or centrist in any meaningful sense and the so-called center moves further to the right with each election cycle. For nearly two decades now this process has been steadily advancing on the Democratic side, as liberals are trained to accept the idea that the national majority will never accept a true labor party, or any candidate perceived as “soft” on defense.”

PoliticsLesser EvilCentrist
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“[Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles’ worth of campaign cash – that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there’s no other explanation that makes any sense.”

GovernmentUnited StatesHealth CareObamacare
Book:Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
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“People aren't pissed just to be pissed. They're mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure.”

AngryFraudCriminalBanksWall StreetGoldman SachsWhite Collar CrimeAngry PeopleBankstersMortgage CrisisBailoutSubprime Mortgage LoansSubprime Mortgage CrisisBanksterVampire SquidWhite Collar Criminal2008 Economic ImplosionLloyd BlankfeinRolling Stone MagazineWall Street Bailout
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“I was a lapsing Christian, but in what direction was I lapsing? To nowhere, to nothingness. As absurd as the church was, it was an improvement over my actual life because there was at least a pretense of meaning there. Back in New York, I was just eating and taking up space, a depraved postmodern creature on the job, carrying pebbles up the media anthill.”

PoliticsCurrent EventsPolitical CommentaryPolitical Opinion
Book:The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
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“... Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous informational sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before. A factory worker in suburban Ohio now needed to understand the cultures of places like Bangalore and Beijing if he wanted to know why he'd lost his job. Which, incidentally, he probably had. Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the Internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him. What story is he going to tell?”

PopulismCurrent EventsPolitical CommentaryPolitical Opinion
Book:The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
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“Say Bank A is holding $10 million in A-minus-rated IBM bonds. It goes to Bank B and makes a deal: we’ll pay you $50,000 a year for five years and in exchange, you agree to pay us $10 million if IBM defaults sometime in the next five years—which of course it won’t, since IBM never defaults. If Bank B agrees, Bank A can then go to the Basel regulators and say, “Hey, we’re insured if something goes wrong with our IBM holdings. So don’t count that as money we have at risk. Let us lend a higher percentage of our capital, now that we’re insured.” It’s a win-win. Bank B makes, basically, a free $250,000. Bank A, meanwhile, gets to lend out another few million more dollars, since its $10 million in IBM bonds is no longer counted as at-risk capital. That was the way it was supposed to work. But two developments helped turn the CDS from a semisensible way for banks to insure themselves against risk into an explosive tool for turbo leverage across the planet. One is that no regulations were created to make sure that at least one of the two parties in the CDS had some kind of stake in the underlying bond. The so-called naked default swap allowed Bank A to take out insurance with Bank B not only on its own IBM holdings, but on, say, the soon-to-be-worthless America Online stock Bank X has in its portfolio. This is sort of like allowing people to buy life insurance on total strangers with late-stage lung cancer—total insanity. The other factor was that there were no regulations that dictated that Bank B had to have any money at all before it offered to sell this CDS insurance.”

CdsCredit Default SwapNaked Default Swap
Book:Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
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“When I heard the book (Thomas Friedman's latest) was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays.”

WritingHumansTwoBookWould BeLanguageWorryHeardGeniusCriticismInnocentMake SenseFeaturesLengthReviewsPassagesInvitesUsualComing OutEssaysIncompetenceRatiosSingle Word
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.”

LongEndsHandsLawProcessWealthViewsPovertyWeaknessPoint Of ViewGiantsReplacedBureaucracyRule Of LawWealth And Success
Book:The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
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“Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.”

FeelingsPoorSuccessfulRichCuttingBuildingWeakHatredProfoundTerrorDeeperBureaucracyCorrespondingGroveling
Book:The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
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“In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they dont realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.”

MeanCountryAmericaPoliticalRealizingPartyRevolutionVictoryMeaningfulOur CountryTeaNarrativePollsTea PartyAmerican RevolutionPolitical Change
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates.”

PeopleIfsWorldLooksEndsReadingWorryNotionCardsRevolutionaryGatesRomeEnd Of The WorldBarbariansApocalypticConsultingBangingTarotInvadingTarot Cards
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.”

WayGivingFactsDealsCuttingHappenedTroubleTelevisionIndustryInternetOrganizationMagazinesJournalismPrintCheckersInvestigative JournalismBroadcast Journalism
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“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?”

IfsWantWellsLooksPlayDreamAmericaWinningLevelsHighestFairsThreatFinancialStupidityLoserAmerican DreamAssaultIncentivesIncompetenceMeanness
Author:Matt Taibbi
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