cornerstone of policing, for instance, in New York City, where I live. Last year, in New York City, they issued 600,000 summonses for things like riding the wrong way down a sidewalk on your bicycle – that [one] was 20,000 summonses. There were 80,000 for open container violations. JEFFREY: What was the hardest part for you to slog your way through in understanding: the fiscal crisis or the criminal justice system? TAIBBI: I remember the first time when I started to read about the financial crisis; it was after the Sarah Palin speech. It was September 3rd, 2008. I was at the convention and I was in the filing room after her speech. I was just about to write up her thing and I’m looking on the Internet and I’m seeing that the world is ending. I was so worried about this because we didn’t know anything about the economy and it was blowing up before our eyes. But everybody I talked to just spoke in that impenetrable jargon, and it’s really, really difficult to get a read on it. I would call up people and say, “Tell me something about something.” That’s how desperate I was in the beginning. I just would randomly call up analysts and just say, “Tell me something understandable.” It wasn’t until I found a guy who basically made cartoons about Goldman Sachs who sat me down and he walked me through some very basic things about how subprime mortgages worked and how collateralized debt obligations worked. I got the basics of it, but it took me three months.
JEFFREY: Your pieces can seem very fueled by rage. I’m wondering how that helps you propel yourself through a piece and also does it sometimes make you feel like, “Wait, I have to feel on my own personal level a sense of hope”? What is that thing that you’re hopeful about? TAIBBI: I think it’s important for a journalist just to have a sense of outrage about things. This is one of the things that motivated me to kind of move in a certain direction with my career. A long, long time ago, I worked for a newspaper in Moscow called The Moscow Times. We would be writing about things that were sort of epic scandals like the loans-for-shares scandal, which was a thing where a bunch of Boris Yeltsin’s buddies privatized the jewels of the Soviet industrial empire to themselves for free. We would describe these things and we would use this sort of unemotional language. It occurred to me that if you’re writing about something that’s outrageous and you don’t write with outrage, then that’s deceptive. JEFFREY: So after you left The Moscow Times, you helped found a really subversive publication called The eXile, which mercilessly attacked Russian officials and others. What would the Matt Taibbi of then say to the Vladimir Putin of now? TAIBBI: Vladimir Putin was an officer the last couple of years when I was at The eXile. We were actually more upset not with Putin back then, but with the American reporters who were enabling him. When Putin came up through the ranks, he was thought of as a friend of the United States. People thought
that he was going to be a continuation of the Yeltsin presidency. Yeltsin, of course, was basically a patsy for the United States government and Putin, being his handpicked successor, they would use terms like technocrat to describe him. I remember, particularly, there was a New York Times story that talked about his past as a KGB agent. They went into this whole thing about how the KGB actually wasn’t that bad of an organization and that in the Leningrad of the 1970s, where Putin grew up, it was a cool career choice for a young man of talent and intelligence. They made all of these excuses for a guy who not only had been a KGB agent, but had basically been a bagman for one of the most corrupt mayors in Russia, which is saying a lot. What would I say to him now? Look, he’s been horrible. I was personal friends with a couple of journalists who are no longer with us because of Vladimir Putin. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya. Putin’s a difficult character to sort of sum up easily because he’s a bit of a hero to the ordinary Russian person because he represents standing up to the West; he represents keeping Russia’s wealth in Russia, which he did achieve on some level. During the Yeltsin years, the Russian capital was flying out of the country and ending up in Swiss banks and the Russian people were suffering. So he’s a complicated character. I think he’s morphed into a classic Russian strong man. That type has reappeared over and over again in Russian history and it’s almost never a good thing. Photo by Ed Ritger
J U N E/J U LY 2014
THE COMMO N WE AL TH
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