Articles by Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone
We found 34 results.
Baghdadi Story Reveals Divided–and Broken–News Media
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
4 Nov 2019
28 Oct 2019 – Two sets of headlines described the suicide of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. From the Washington Post: Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Austere Religious Scholar at Helm of Islamic State, Dies At 48. Meanwhile, at FOX News: Al-Baghdadi Kill: How the Daring Military Operation Went Down. If You Have Two Sets of News Media, You Have None
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50 Years after the Moon Landing: Why Conspiracy Theories Won’t Die
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
29 Jul 2019
Belief in a faked moon program is one of the first great “fake news” stories. Why there are sure to be a lot more going forward. [TMS Appendix: Related materials debunking the moon landing]
→ read full articleWhy the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
22 Apr 2019
11 Apr 2019 – The WikiLeaks founder will be tried in a real court for one thing, but for something else in the court of public opinion. His indictment falls just short of a full frontal attack on press freedoms.
→ read full articleThe Pentagon Wins Again
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
8 Apr 2019
4 Apr 2019 – In budget negotiations this week, congressional Democrats seem to have brought knives to the Republican gunfight. This time, the issue was defense spending. In an effort to prevent non-defense cuts, House Democrats grant the DOD exactly the raise it wanted.
→ read full articleTaibbi: Why Aren’t We Talking More about Trump’s Nihilism?
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
8 Oct 2018
1 Oct 2018 – While America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh drama last week, the Washington Post unearthed a crazy tidbit in the latest environmental impact statement. The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable.
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Why We Know So Little about the U.S.-Backed War in Yemen
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
30 Jul 2018
27 Jul 2018 – What the U.N. calls the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” is an unhappy confluence of American media taboos. A quote from a Yemeni doctor sums it up: “The missiles that kill us, American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks … American-made. You are saying to me, where is America? America is the whole thing.”
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Seymour Hersh’s Memoir Is Full of Useful Reporting Secrets
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
4 Jun 2018
The best of his generation writes a how-to that undermines the industry of Access Journalism.
→ read full articleIf We’re on the Brink of War, the Fault Is Ours, Not Trump’s or Bolton’s
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
16 Apr 2018
They have an excuse – they’re stupid and crazy. What’s ours?
→ read full articleTaibbi: The Legacy of the Iraq War
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
26 Mar 2018
21 Mar 2018 – Fifteen years ago this week, George W. Bush invaded Iraq. It was an awesome drama, made more thrilling by the seemingly obvious craziness of it all. The invasion is no longer just one of the great crimes of this or any age – it’s become a crossroads event in the history of America’s decline.
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RIP Edward Herman, Who Co-Wrote a Book That’s Now More Important Than Ever
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
20 Nov 2017
14 Nov 2017 – Edward Herman, the co-author (with Noam Chomsky) of Manufacturing Consent, has died. He was 92. His work has never been more relevant. Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers.
→ read full articleJournalist Amy Goodman Shouldn’t Be Arrested for Covering Dakota Pipeline Story
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
17 Oct 2016
To the offending prosecutor, Ladd Erickson, who is apparently a fan. I don’t normally like to disagree with anyone possessing the excellent judgment to be a regular reader of mine, but Erickson is dead wrong here. Amy Goodman was clearly acting as a reporter at the protest. Moreover, she’s as close to the ideal of what it means to be a journalist as one can get in this business.
→ read full articleMuhammad Ali Was a Hero, but His Enemies Have a Legacy Too
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
13 Jun 2016
At an armed forces examining station, he refused to step forward to a white line when his name was called. The awesome drama of that moment made Ali hated at the time, but also turned him into a martyr to history. The symbolism of a man who made his living fighting refusing to fight was extraordinarily powerful. His enemies learned from the mistake and spent a generation making sure that the next of his ilk, in the unlikely event that he or she ever comes along, won’t become so powerful a dissenting influence.
→ read full articleRupert Murdoch Is Deviant Scum
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
19 Oct 2015
For Murdoch and Fox, the Chickens Might Be Coming Home to Roost – Murdoch owns or controls print, cable and film outlets in so many places that his cultural and political views are fast becoming a feature of global geography.
→ read full articleJudith Miller’s Comeback
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
1 Jun 2015
The disgraced reporter’s memoir: 400 pages of dogs eating 400 pages of homework. I’d say this will be a no-holds-barred review, but I promised myself I wouldn’t compare this book to ‘Mein Kampf’ for at least 500 words. So it’s not completely without restrictions.
→ read full articleAfter Netanyahu Speech, Congress Is Officially High School
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
9 Mar 2015
Israeli Prime Minister’s visit inspires bitchy barbs and insults, and nobody came out of this week looking good except Obama because he mostly stayed off camera and kept his mouth shut. It was a depressing, circus-like demonstration of how schizoid and dysfunctional Washington politics have become.
→ read full article10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
15 Dec 2014
From ‘Rectal Feeding’ to mock executions, the most horrifying revelations about how we abused prisoners after 9/11.
→ read full articleThe $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
10 Nov 2014
Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon paid $9 billion to keep the public from hearing. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
→ read full articleThank You, Rolling Stone
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
24 Feb 2014
20 Feb 2014 – Today is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I’m leaving to work for First Look Media [The Intercept], the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras. I wish there was something I could say that is stronger than Thank You. No journalist has ever been luckier than me. Thank you, Rolling Stone.
→ read full articleThe Vampire Squid Strikes again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
17 Feb 2014
Banks are no longer just financing heavy industry. They are actually buying it up and inventing bigger, bolder and scarier scams than ever.
→ read full articleLurid Subprime Scams Unveiled in Long-Running Fraud Trial
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
16 Dec 2013
12 Dec 2013 – Lost amid the hoopla over JP Morgan Chase’s record-setting $13 billion settlement was news of another monster court resolution – a $2.46 billion judgment, the largest ever awarded after trial in a securities fraud class action case, handed down against a HSBC acquisition.
→ read full articleAnother Batch of Wall Street Villains Freed on Technicality
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
9 Dec 2013
You can send a guy away for life on a murder charge based on a speck of blood and an old lady who saw a piece of a license number on a car screeching away from the scene. But you need to build a massive rhetorical case from scratch just to indict someone for being part of a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy.
→ read full articleChase Isn’t the Only Bank in Trouble
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
11 Nov 2013
There are multiple scandals blowing up right now, including a whole set of ominous legal cases that could result in punishments so extreme that they might significantly alter the long-term future of the financial services sector.
→ read full articleChase, Once Considered “The Good Bank,” Is About to Pay another Massive Settlement
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
22 Jul 2013
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will fine Chase “close to $1 billion” for manipulating energy prices in Enron-esque fashion in Michigan and California.
→ read full articleThe Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
24 Jun 2013
It’s long been suspected that ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s helped trigger the meltdown. A new trove of embarrassing documents shows how they did it.
→ read full articleEverything Is Rigged: This Time, It’s Currencies
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
17 Jun 2013
Given the LIBOR story, the Interest Rate Swap manipulation story, the Euro gas price manipulation story, the U.S. energy price manipulation story, and (by now) countless others of the “Everything is Rigged” variety, this screams out for immediate notice. Via Bloomberg: Traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice . . .
→ read full articleEverything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
6 May 2013
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
→ read full articleGangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
18 Feb 2013
How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it. Its case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching¬ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated¬ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway. An arrestable class and an unarrestable class. We always suspected it, now it’s admitted. So what do we do?
→ read full articleOutrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
24 Dec 2012
The banks’ laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC’s Mexican branches and “deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows.”
→ read full articleA Rare Look at Why the Government Won’t Fight Wall Street
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
24 Sep 2012
The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption.
→ read full articleLudicrous Times Op-Ed Forgets Entire Year of Wall Street History
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
6 Aug 2012
Sanford Weill, the onetime head of Citibank, went on CNBC to announce that he thought it was time to break up the big banks. The Wall Street Journal put it this way: “Mr. Weill finds himself suddenly welcome in the company of editorialists who, since the Libor scandal, have been renewing their clamor for bankers to be imprisoned, if not executed. He’s become their new hero. The inherent Stalinism of those who crave to put bankers in jail for things that aren’t crimes is not unlike that of the original Stalinist – who understood that nothing of substance has to change if you’ve got enough scapegoats.”
→ read full articleFrom an Unlikely Source, a Serious Challenge to Wall Street
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
23 Jul 2012
There’s something brewing that looks like it might be a blueprint to effectively take on the financial services industry: a plan to allow local governments to take on the problem of neighborhoods blighted by toxic home loans and foreclosures through the use of eminent domain. Cooked up by a small group of businessmen and ex-venture capitalists, the audacious idea falls under the category of “That’s so crazy, it just might work!”
→ read full articleThe Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
25 Jun 2012
How America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy – until they were caught on tape. Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer.
→ read full articleThe $2 Billion UBS Incident: ‘Rogue Trader’ My Ass
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
19 Sep 2011
The news that a “rogue trader” (I hate that term – more on that in a moment) has soaked the Swiss banking giant UBS for $2 billion has rocked the international financial community and threatened to drive a stake through any chance Europe had of averting economic disaster. They’re not “rogue” for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples’ money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street. Hell, they don’t call these guys “rogue traders” when they make a billion dollars gambling.
→ read full articleLara Logan, You Suck
Matt Taibbi – Rolling Stone,
19 Jul 2010
Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag. And the part that really gets me is Logan bitching about how Hastings was dishonest to use human warmth and charm to build up enough of a rapport with his sources that they felt comfortable running their mouths off in front of him. According to Logan, that’s sneaky — and journalists aren’t supposed to be sneaky.
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