Matt Taibbi Quotes

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few ...

All the measures of government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists… we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already”

Over time, economic benefits are accrued to the stronger, shrewder people in society, and if unrestrained by government, conditions would lead to economic autocracy and political despotism.

In socialism, everything is supposed to be equal. And yet, it's always fascinating how the elite government bureaucrats (in socialist places like Venezuela, Cuba and Argentina) are the ones that wind up with all the money.

There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

Are we prepared to take on the enormous political power of the billionaire class or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy?

A government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.

These 'masters of the universe' must be tamed in the interests of the ordinary families whose jobs and livelihoods are being put at risk. The Tories won't say anything about the current crisis as they are completely in the pockets of the hedge funds.

In our case [the United States] it happens to be basically corporate structure. Much of the population is going to be harmed by that. Those policies are designed to turn state power into an instrument that works for the wealthy. Maybe there are some crumbs for the rest of the population, maybe not. But that's given.

Our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges.

The concentration of U.S. income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime.

Our society's sort of turning into a two-class system, where... most of the wealth and privileges are being concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. And there's the rest of us... that have to go out and work and struggle and live and die and try to find some happiness and contentment and security.

Globalism is a scheme for impoverishing First World labor and taking power and influence from the hands of the many and putting them in the hands of the few.

Wealth is used to entrench inequality, not to trickle down and solve it.

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.

God, how patient are Thy poor! These corporations and masters of manipulation in finance heaping up great fortunes by a system of legalized extortion, and then exacting from the contributors-to whom a little means so much-a double share to guard the treasure!

This is what oligarchy looks like: Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes more than 40 percent of all campaign contributions. The billionaire class owns the political system and reaps the benefits from it.

For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have bore the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed.

I think the big problem is you have a vicious cycle of wealth and power in America that's just gotten completely out of control and you've seen it in politics.

There ain't no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.... Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them... Decent people lost their jobs.... Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It's the system.

If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.