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.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the practices of Wall Street that exploit the middle class for profit.
Matt Taibbi's quote highlights the detrimental impact of Wall Street on the economy and the middle class, suggesting that financial institutions prioritize profit-making over the well-being of ordinary people. He views the actions of these institutions as a systematic depletion of resources from the middle class, describing it metaphorically as a process of stripping away the last remnants of value from a once-thriving segment of society.
In practice
During a lecture on economic inequality, one might cite this quote to emphasize the exploitation of the middle class by wealthy financial institutions.
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.
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.
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.
In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.
It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.
There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.
Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.
You could not possibly maintain the current level of government taxation without the taxes being hidden, and they are hidden in two very different ways. They are hidden through withholding, but they are also hidden by being imposed on business, supposedly on business, when really, of course, business can't pay taxes, only people can pay taxes.
Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
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