Matt Taibbi's new book The Divide:American Justice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (Random
House; Spiegal & Grau, 2014, 448 pages, $27.00) is certain to
make you angry, whatever side of the political spectrum you inhabit.
The simple thesis of the book is that America's justice system is
deeply divided along lines of race, culture, class, and (most of all)
wealth into two distinct groups receiving distinctly different
treatment at the hands of the police, the courts, and the political
system. The genius of the book is how Taibbi hammers home his
evidence to build an overwhelming indictment of not only injustice
the system, but how much it costs all of us in lost opportunity and
wealth. Taibbi builds his case by being a terrific story teller. He
takes the reader into the homes, the offices, and courts with
riveting interviews and loads of solidly compiled evidence to evoke,
at first, some disbelief, but ultimately a deep conviction that
something is wrong here, and we need to become outraged enough to do
something about it. The reader is left, like Howard Beale in the
Paddy Cheyevsky/Sidmey Lumet Film Network, leaning
out the window screaming, “I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to
take any more!”
Taibbi develops his
premise by telling, in alternating chapters, stories about the poor,
mostly black and Hispanic people, who are systematically treated with
disrespect and humiliating injustice by the police, the courts, and
the government with examples from the world of banking and high
finance in which the institutions are deemed “too big to fail”
and neither institutions nor individuals are seriously punished for
their frauds (for crimes of fraud they certainly are) because of a
doctrine of possible “collateral damage” to the innocent
developed by Eric Holder when he served in the Attorney General's
office under President Bill Clinton. Don't let Eric Holder's name set
your heart a-pounding, though, as both Democrats and Republicans,
including each of our last three Presidents, come in for their
well-deserved share of the blame for the current shameful situation.
Taibbi asks the
reader to consider the question of why some criminals go free while
others committing “the same crime suffer the full weight of the
states' power?” He argues that through the 1980's and 1990's the
Justice Department had brought criminal charges against Boesky,
Milkken, Keating and others as well as bank fraud cases against
Drexel Burnham Lambert, Suisse Bank, and Bankers' Trust. More than
800 people were sent to jail as a result of the savings and loan
crisis. Eric Holder's, at the time little noticed, 1999 memo urges
prosecutors to consider the “collateral consequences” (that is
the possible damage to innocent employees and stock holders caught up
in the crimes of corporations and individuals within the
corporations) might have. Combined with globalization and the “too
big to fail” doctrine, this memo made attaining more convictions
increasingly difficult. In the Obama administration, this difficulty
combined with a deep concern about bringing cases that would be
difficult and time consuming to win in which the weak became the
object of prosecution leading to jail time, while the powerful either
paid fines or were left alone. In stunning detail, Taibbi tells the
story of the massive fraud perpetrated against the public by the sale
of Lehman Brothers to Barclay Bank, in which hundreds of billions of
dollars where lost while individual bankers were richly rewarded
without risk. Meanwhile, the prosecutors preen at jailing Bernie
Madoff while the banks who cooperated in his fraud go scot free.
The
other side of the equation is represented by a number of individuals
who become victims of either the mindless or vicious application of
the criminal and civil justice system to the poor and powerless. We
see the effect of New York City's stop and frisk law on the poor and
the black. People merely minding their own business talking to
friends on the street encounter teams of police who jam them against
walls and, if they find no incriminating evidence, manufacture it to
obtain an arrest and fill out their citation books' quotas. Once in
“the system,” they are subjected to the mindless indignities of
lazy, tired judges and overworked, cynical public defenders. The
system works to keep people, even those with jobs and homes, from
meeting their responsibilities, leading to their being fired and even
more unable to pay too large fines for being, perhaps, in the wrong
place at the wrong time. While “collateral consequences” were
being recognized for massive corporate misdeeds, the consequences of
wholesale arrests on the families and lives of poor people were never
considered in a country with over 2,000,000 people in jail, many in
profit-making private prisons whose congressional lobby is one of the
most powerful in Washington, D.C. Placing the two systems of
“Justice” side-by-side points to an inequity in society which
always benefits the white and the wealthy. The reader must sit by in
disgust at the waste and inefficiency of the systematic flaws, while
lives with some hope in them are ruined for behavior that would be
overlooked if the perpetrator were white or lived in the suburbs.
The only way to
understand the chaos of the courts and police system or the failure
to achieve justice in the world of banking and finance is through an
anecdotal approach, which Taibbi has mastered. His accounts of the
plight of undocumented workers and even a corporate whistle blower
whose life is nearly destroyed by pointing out Chase bank's fraud in
mortgage foreclosures fills the reader with a realization of the
hopelessness, weariness, boredom, and desperation of the residents,
police, lawyers, and judges caught in a system relying on phony data.
Meanwhile, the defendants in the Gen Re and AIG cases go umpunished
because of mercy pleas to a credulous judge. Taibbi, because of his
skill as a story teller, puts a human face on the undocumented
immigrants seeking only to find work and their American born children
who become “collateral damage.” Taibbi says, the “nasty
anti-social behavior of Wall Street crooks went almost completely
unpunished: the system failed due to a combination of corruption,
regulatory capture, pusillanimity of government officials, structural
biases in the civil courts, and other causes.” Taibbi argues that
the only way to fully understand the differences in the way fraud is
treated across the divide is to see the way different people across
the social scale are treated. He presents so many well-documented and
researched examples that they become overwhelming.
Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi is an
American author and journalist writing on politics, the media,
finance, and sports for Rolling Stone and Men's Journal. We grew up
in Boston and was educated at Concord Academy and Bard College. His
writings have been seen as somewhat controversial. He lives in New
Jersey.
With
the publication of The Divide: American Justice in the Ageof the Wealth Gap (Random House;
Spiegal & Grau, 2014, 448 pages, $27.00) Matt Taibbi seems to
have developed an increased maturity in his analysis and
presentation. While his writing may be seen by some as sometimes
overheated hyperbole, for the most part his outrage is controlled,
his reasoning well-supported, and the case he develops deeply
convincing. His argument that there is a deep divide between rich and
poor, black and white in the American systems of criminal and civil
justice seems incontrovertible. The Divide
was provided to me as an electronic galley by the publisher through
Edelweiss. I read in on my Kindle.
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