When the Crossfire paradigm loses its force, all that’s left is a bunch of people with different views all sitting together in a room, wondering why they’re all paying three bucks a gallon for gas,...

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We...

I think that if you’re a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.

Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators’ time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.

Gross Domestic Product—the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.

It’s really interesting that we’ve had this great Tea Party movement that is all about restoring free market capitalist values, but what they completely fail to understand is that what we’ve got now is a...

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance.

Private equity firms aren’t necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

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.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers...

In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.

Being in the building with Sarah Palin that night is a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It’s a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of...

Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.

‘Prop trading’ is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

Candidates don’t want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others...

lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world’s outstanding bureaucratic abomination – a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their...

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally...

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and...

In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it’s difficult to tell whether it’s the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it’s the other way...

Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid – my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people.

These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America’s ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what’s left of...

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn’t just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations – it’s also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of...

intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over...

2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went...

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.

The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis – and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway – shows a culture that is slowly...

Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end.

I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let’s put it that way. I didn’t take pleasure in hard work.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood...

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you’ll buy products that they’re advertising.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can’t fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the...

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron...

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the...

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast...

If the law doesn’t apply equally to everybody, then you don’t really have a system of law.

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington.

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind’s eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.

In the ’50s and ’60s, journalism wasn’t a profession. It wasn’t something you went to college for – it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working...