24 results for "matt taibbi"
I mean, he could’ve taken Joe Lieberman back there and said, look, if Connecticut ever wants a dime of highway money again, you’re going to have to play ball on this thing. That’s what the president does. I mean, the president has an enormous amount of power. The leaders, the majority leaders have an enormous amount of power. And if they want to pass something, they can do it. And especially when there’s a tremendous public mandate to get something like this passed. I just- the idea that they couldn’t do this was- is a fallacy.
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Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi - Friday appearance on Bill Moyers Journal
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Amidst fading hopes for real reform on issues ranging from high finance to health care, economist Robert Kuttner and journalist Matt Taibbi join Bill Moyers to discuss Wall Street’s power over the federal government.
pbs
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi walks through Barack Obama’s banking sellout, beginning with the president’s transition team. According to Taibbi, Obama’s transformation from populist to Wall Street’s best friend started on day one.
Matt Taibbi: Obama’s Wall Street 180 Started on Election Day
If you happen to be a rich dweeb who went to the right schools and hung around with the same group of people your whole life, and those people actually run the world, well, then, you’re in the very happy position of having your own bullshit adolescent belief system become self-reinforcing. You think that reality coincides with your beliefs because your beliefs are true, whereas in truth it’s because you spend all your time with people who believe the same nonsense you do, and generations of your cultural ancestors just happen to have built very high walls all around you fools to keep reality from getting in and spoiling things.
Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash. These people actually believe this shit and they believe it with the imbecilic ferocity of teenagers, even the ones who are 190 years old like Greenspan (who incidentally finally conceded a “flaw” in his thinking, but only after the entire world exploded and even all the reality-proof friendly data sources he had relied upon for his whole life told him his ideas were fucked), and it’s nearly impossible to get them to let so much as a sliver of their belief systems go.
I found most of the content of Moore’s movie horrifying. It was also striking to me that the theme he is addressing here, i.e. the rapid peasant-ization of most of the country, is basically a taboo subject for every other major media outlet in the country. The vast majority of our movies are either thinly-disguised commercials for consumer products (Law Abiding Citizen), remakes of old shows and movies designed to transport us back to the good old days when life was better (i.e. Fame) , or gushy nerf-tripe with no hard edges crafted to serve as escapist fairy tales for stressed-out adults wanting to dream of happy endings (Love Happens).
I’ll say this for George Bush: you’d never have caught him frantically negotiating against himself to take the meat out of a signature legislative initiative just because his approval ratings had a bad summer. Can you imagine Bush and Karl Rove allowing themselves to be paraded through Washington on a leash by some dimwit Republican Senator of a state with six people in it the way the Obama White House this summer is allowing Max Baucus (favorite son of the mighty state of Montana) to frog-march them to a one-term presidency?
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Matt Taibbi (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics) (via billda)
How to get the left to praise GWB: Exhibit A. I never thought I’d see the day.
Thank you, Barack.
(via sds)
I think a ton of people have forgotten Bush’s failed town hall parade across the country while trying to privatize social security. yeah, granted he was able to jam the Iraq war down a frightened country’s throat but lets not lose sight of his failures as a salesman. hello harriet miers.
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soupsoup:
Ianthe Jeanne Dugan and Alistair Macdonald at The Wall Street Journal
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to issue a report next month suggesting speculators played a significant role in driving wild swings in oil prices — a reversal of an earlier CFTC position that augurs intensifying scrutiny on investors.
In a contentious report last year, the main U.S. futures-market regulator pinned oil-price swings primarily on supply and demand. But that analysis was based on “deeply flawed data,” Bart Chilton, one of four CFTC commissioners, said in an interview Monday.
Matt Taibbi pointed this out in his infamous Rolling Stone article about Goldman Sachs.
Last night Bill Maher challenged Matt Taibbi a bit about Goldman Sachs.
Crooks and Liars
Max Keiser: “Goldman Sachs Are Scum”
“They are literally stealing a hundred million dollars a day. Goldman Sachs is stealing every day on the floor of the exchange. They should be in the Hague, they should be taken on financial terrorism charges. They should all be thrown in jail” — zero hedge.
“Man, and I thought I hated Goldman. Check out this video. If only American TV was like this!” - Matt Taibbi via The Smirking Chimp
Air America’s Sam Seder interviews Rolling Stone Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose new article, The Great American Bubble Machine, on how Goldman Sachs cheated its way through the financial crisis, is creating a huge buzz. - Pt 2, 3 and 4
via Break Room
It’s been interesting, to say the least, watching the public reaction to my Rolling Stone piece last week. I of course expected that some kind of highly unpleasant response would come my way from Goldman and its allies in the press, but I admit to being surprised a little by the form this response took. Obviously I don’t want to dwell on this business, because it’s beyond boring when someone in my position complains about his critics, but I feel like I have to say something about at least a few of the talking points of the inevitable Goldman counteroffensive, which in various forms (letters sent to me personally, public comments) have reached my desk in the last few days…
Goldman Sachs has played a crucial role in creating every market bubble since the 1920s — and has profited from not only the bubbles, but from the crash that followed as well, says a new expose in Rolling Stone magazine.
An article in the July 9-23 issue of the magazine, written by Matt Taibbi, lists five asset bubbles that the 140-year-old investment bank helped create — and one that Taibbi asserts the firm is currently working to make happen…
On his blog, Taibbi has begun a discussion of the public reaction to his article.
HBO’s Online Overtime Segment: Bill Maher hosted Reza Aslan, author Naomi Klein, animator Seth MacFarlane and journalist Matt Taibbi.
The Raw Story
frothyparadise:
Matt Taibbi delivers a most excellent smackdown to the “Dear AIG, I quit” guy. A sample:
“But all of this is really secondary to the tone of DeSantis’ letter. He acts like he’s a victim because he didn’t get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes: “None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.” First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber’s salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you’re inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down — well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn’t get paid for that job.”
