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.
Policy makers should be compelled to take action given the serious costs of long-term unemployment when overall unemployment is already high. A week of unemployment is worse when it is experienced as part of a longer spell.
There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way.
In a globalized economy, jobs no longer need a passport, but workers do.
It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
Today we have a temporary aberration called "industrial capitalism" which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital, the natural world and properly functioning societies._x000D_ _x000D_ No sensible capitalist would do that.
If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.
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