Goldman Sachs staff will receive the biggest bonuses in the firm's 140-year history this year. In Matt Taibbi's epic Rolling Stone piece this month, he describes the financial firm as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity"; and "the planet-eating Death Star of political influence". — Read the rest

Snip from a blog post by Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi on the media phenomenon surrounding Republical vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

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 like Karl Rove.

Bro-in-chief Elon Musk, whose emotional development stalled in middle school, found a fresh way to be terrible this week by mocking a blind person's disability.

It all started when the thin-skinned South African entrepreneur had a manbaby meltdown after blind government watchdog Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette committed the sin of testifying to Congress about waste in Musk's precious DOGE program. — Read the rest

If you're the kind of person who's ever wondered, "What the hell happened to Glenn Greenwald?" or "Damn, I liked Matt Taibbi during the Iraq War, but what happened?," then Eoin Higgins' new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left is the book for you. — Read the rest

Elon Musk, the world's second smartest, funniest, and most beloved man, shared the stage with Donald Trump, the world's first smartest, funniest, and most beloved man on Sunday at a totally normal and not-at-all cult-like campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday. — Read the rest

The worms in Elon's brain have been more active than usual lately. This week, the parasitic creatures made him block a conservative Washington Examiner reporter for having the nerve to disprove his lie about Biden's immigration policies.

Posting to Xitter, Anna Giaritelli, a Homeland Security reporter for the Examiner, gave her account of what happened:

Elon Musk followed me on X a couple years ago and has shared my work and been willing to respond to DMs about stories from time to time, including a back and forth we had for a story on the Secret Service last week.

"You can't have a conversation with Biden or Kamala. It's like talking to an NPC." — Elon Musk

"A wall of negative headlines was so predictable. They're such NPCs" — Elon Musk

"Easy to tell who is an NPC today" — Elon Musk

Elon Musk uses "NPC" to describe people who disagree with him. — Read the rest

Matt Taibbi's (previously) latest Rolling Stone column traces the long history of rich Democrat donors and the officials whom they fund attacking progressive candidates, showing how the same playbook used to attack Dennis Kucinich in 2003 is now being rolled out to attack Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (I am a donor to both the Sanders and Warren campaigns).

From a distance, it's hard to understand the nuance of the mass "gilets jaunes" protests that rocked France; with one in five French people identifying as a yellow vest and more vests marching in Basra, Baghdad and Alberta (and with Egypt's autocrats pre-emptive cracking down on the sale of yellow vests ahead of elections), it's clearly a complicated and fast-spreading phenomenon.

George HW Bush was a mass murderer and a war criminal and now he is dead.

In 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations both argued that they had a duty to transfer more than $700,000,000,000 of American taxpayers' money to the largest banks in the country, because these banks were "too big to fail" and allowing them to collapse would do much more harm than a mere $0.7 trillion subsidy.

Nobody covered the Wall Street collapse, bailout, and corrupt resurgence better than Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, from giving Goldman Sachs its unforgettable epithet to covering the hearings on the bailouts to documenting the foreclosure mills, to deep dives into the sweetheart deals the banks got; to the revolving door between finance regulators and the finance sector to the rise of Occupy; to the consolidation of financial primacy after the collapse; to the double-standard for criminal justice revealed by the collapse; to the frauds that surfaced after the crash; to the tiny bright spots where bankers were brought to justice; all capped by an incandescent, outstanding book about the crisis and the systematic racial and economic justice it revealed.

Senator Bob Corker got a rush of progressive love when he dissed Donald Trump in public, then fell from grace when he flipflopped on blocking the tax-bill after his colleagues modified it to personally give him millions — but that guy was always dirty as hell.

Hang around libertarians long enough and eventually one of them will start talking about "public choice theory" (I last heard it raised by a prominent libertarian scholar to justify corporations imposing adhesion contracts on their customers to force them to buy expensive consumables and service). — Read the rest

Oklahoma Senator James Lankford (@SenatorLankford; (405) 231-4941) sounded the alarm about Russian trolls spreading discord about NFL athletes kneeling for the national anthem, citing as evidence a Twitter account called "Boston Antifa" whose "location" field had been filled in "Vladivostok, Russia."

When Trump was on the campaign trail, he had a surefire racism strategy: he'd say something horribly racist ("Mexicans are rapists") then refuse to back down (giving comfort to overt racists), then finally back down a little (giving comfort to closet racists), then complain that the press wouldn't accept his apology (reinforcing his point that the media was unfair to him and pleasing his whole base).

Tim Harford points out that Dieselgate — when VW designed cars that tried to guess when they were undergoing emissions test and dial back their pollution — wasn't the first time an industry designed its products to cheat when regulators were looking; the big banks did the same thing to beat the "stress tests" that finance regulators used to check whether they would collapse during economic downturns (the banks "made very specific, narrow bets designed to pay off gloriously in specific stress-test scenarios" so that they looked like they'd do better than they actually would).

The most remarkable criminal justice story of 2017 is that the FBI has arrested a real corporate criminal, a VW executive who tried to engineer a coverup of the Dieselgate scandal, and that he might go to jail — it's remarkable because the Obama administration spent eight years resolutely not sending criminal executives to jail, preferring instead to let their corporations buy their way out of criminal sanctions with huge fines, a doctrine pioneered by Obama Attorney General Eric Holder back when he worked for Bill Clinton's administration. — Read the rest

The three senior bankers who were sentenced on Friday are among the first to go to jail for illegal actions that contributed to the global economic crisis of 2008, which triggered waves of global instability, which contributed to the ongoing refugee crises and wars, mass unemployment, crippling austerity, the near-collapse of the Eurozone, Brexit, and soaring inequality.

Matt Taibbi takes to Rolling Stone to tell us about the lessons that the US military learned from the powerful bruising it received from Muhummad Ali's refusal to fight in Vietnam: namely, that America should fight its wars with all-volunteer armies whose ranks were disproportionately drawn from the poor and desperate, which dissipated the political pressure that arose from drafting the rich, the powerful and the famous to fight.