By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how complex language and crises can alienate ordinary people from participating in political discourse.
Matt Taibbi critiques how the elite, particularly in finance and politics, create crises that are formulated in a complex language, effectively excluding the general public from understanding and engaging in political processes. This alienation leads to a disenfranchisement where most citizens feel powerless and disconnected from their own political future, as the language and issues remain beyond their grasp.
In practice
During a political rally to emphasize the importance of understanding political language.
You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.
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.
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East.
That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.
Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
These niggaz ain't thugs, the real thugs is the government._x000D_ _x000D_ Don't matter if you Independent, Democrat or Republican,_x000D_ _x000D_ Niggaz politickin' the street, get into beef,_x000D_ _x000D_ Start blastin'...now a new cat is executive chief.
There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.
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