The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi

Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles.

since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth.

We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn’t just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it’s that, plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete.

Holder couldn’t have known it at the time, but through his 1999 Collateral Consequences memo, he had designed a get-out-of-jail-free policy for a kind of company that hadn’t existed yet: the too-big-to-fail megafirm that simply couldn’t be reined in with conventional criminal laws.

not equal to the task of making their monthly payments. The situation was tenable so long as housing prices kept rising and these teeming new populations of home borrowers could keep their heads above water, selling or refinancing their way out of trouble if need be. But the instant the arrow began tilting downward, this rapidly expanding death-balloon of phony real estate value inevitably had to—and did—explode.

At the height of the crisis, this bank-created MERS system was in charge of maintaining the records for 67 million mortgages—and the entire company was staffed by just forty-five people.

In 2011, the year before Tory got arrested, another year when exactly nobody on Wall Street was arrested for crimes connected to the financial crisis, New York City police stopped and searched a record 684,724 people. Out of those, 88 percent were black or Hispanic. The ostensible justification for the program is looking for guns, but they find guns in less than 0.02 percent of stops.

The attorney general of the United States had just admitted, in front of a room full of reporters, that he asks Wall Street for advice before he prosecutes Wall Street. Holder then went on and, finally, pointed all the way

“You can’t just say, ‘We can’t indict because they’re too big’ and then just throw up your hands,” says Barofsky. “If a bank’s size is the only thing preventing you from indicting, making the bank smaller should be a condition of the settlement, so it doesn’t happen again. If you’ve got them by the short hairs, you’ve got to make them break up.”

the disparity in arrests of prostitutes versus johns is growing all over the country. In Lansing, Michigan, police in the 1990s arrested prostitutes and johns in equal numbers. By the early 2000s, it was 3 prostitutes for every john. It was about 7 to 1 in Chicago, about 9 to 1 in Seattle, and in Boston the ratio was 11 to 1.

This was a man who was literally trying to go to jail instead of paying a hundred-dollar fine, and he couldn’t do it without multiple court dates and nearly a dozen hours of waiting and court time. It’s impossible to overestimate the impact, in terms of time and sheer frustration, that all these mindless arrests and summonses have on the people targeted.

You can’t police what you can’t see, and you can’t see in the dark.

So in the end, after hundreds of thousands of pages of motions and depositions, after all that harried effort scouring emails and documents in search of evidence, and after the long hearing in which it was all formally presented, this was the final excuse that all those expensive minds collectively used to wash away the Lehman case: Shit happens!

the undocumented alien who kills a room full of Rotarians with an ax has a right to counsel, a phone call, and protection against improper searches. The alien caught crossing the street on his way to work has no rights at all.

Lawyers admire the right kind of “aggressive” for the same reason we love heist movies: we sympathize with anyone clever enough to penetrate the impenetrable. But those same attorneys sometimes have a hard time seeing past the daring all the way to the consequences on the other end, which might very well be something like seventy thousand creditors losing thousands of dollars apiece, or a whole company’s shareholders losing a total of $600 million.

since 2004 more blacks and Latinos have been accosted by police than actually live in the city.