Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."
I put down my notebook. "Just that?"
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."
posted by vidur
on Feb 16, 2011 -
126 comments
"What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street" - "
Looting Main Street" Matt Taibbi takes an in-depth look into how finance, deregulation, corruption, synthetic rate swaps, and greed decimated Birmingham, AL.
[more inside]
posted by The Whelk
on Apr 12, 2010 -
42 comments
The Baffler, storied zine of cultural and political analysis and criticism, is
back, and excerpts of the latest issue are now online, including a review of Rod Blagojevich's memoir by Matt Taibbi, as well as articles by Christian Parenti and Walter Benn Michaels.
[more inside]
posted by carrienation
on Jan 12, 2010 -
13 comments
Matt Taibbifilter:
Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer! This week's MeFi stories have generally failed to explain the reasoning that caused the recession, even though
Jon Stewart was basically on the mark. Now,
Rolling Stone's only reporter lays it all out
The Big Takeover, a typical combination of zealous snark and the overlooked, damning facts needed to clear up a ridiculously complicated story.
posted by shii
on Mar 20, 2009 -
111 comments
"You’re more worried about friction on the 'Desperate Housewives' set than the lack of health coverage at your tedious, soul-destroying job. You have no idea what is going on in the world, and you’re fine with that. You are why democracy doesn’t work."
YOU are #16 on
The Beast's
50 Most Loathsome People in America list.
posted by Hat Maui
on Jan 20, 2007 -
76 comments
A contrarian review of Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" - "It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans."
Having watched Friedman flog this book on seemingly dozens of talk shows in the last month, I can't say I disagree...
posted by GriffX
on Apr 25, 2005 -
54 comments
Most Americans don't know their left wingers from their right wingers. And no, its not about hockey or chicken parts.
posted by phirleh
on Mar 1, 2005 -
33 comments
At D.C. protests, a few hundred thousand go missing - "Like most young Americans, I've been trained to think of protests and demonstrations as something shameful and vaguely embarrassing-something one outgrows, like Journey albums, or those hour-long showers you took when you were eleven and twelve."
Stinging dead-on reportage about the media's coverage of the anti-war movement, from
Matt Taibbi.
posted by GriffX
on Jan 29, 2003 -
66 comments
