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

by Matt Taibbi

Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.

The other thing here is an idea that being that poor means you should naturally give up any ideas you might have about privacy or dignity.

People are beginning to become disturbingly comfortable with a kind of official hypocrisy. Bizarrely, for instance, we’ve become numb to the idea that rights aren’t absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale.

We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.

What deserves a bigger punishment—someone with a college education who knowingly helps a gangster or a terrorist open a bank account? Or a high school dropout who falls asleep on the F train? The new America says it’s the latter. It’s come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other. We still have real jury trials, honest judges, and free elections, all the superficial characteristics of a functional, free democracy. But underneath that surface is a florid and malevolent bureaucracy that mostly (not absolutely, but mostly) keeps the rich and the poor separate through thousands of tiny, scarcely visible inequities.

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.

The key thing, the one thing that almost every current and former federal prosecutor who lived through this period talks about, is that in the early years of the Obama administration, a huge premium was placed on not losing. Breuer and Holder acted like the corporate stewards they were and gravitated toward a bottom-line strategy of prosecution. They became attracted to a cost-benefit-analysis vision of law enforcement, where the key questions weren’t Who did what? and What the hell should we do about it? but Will we win? and How badly will the press screw us if we lose?

There are two important concepts here that work hand in hand. One, there’s the idea that failure to follow a police order, no matter how stupid or unreasonable, is cause for an arrest or a summons. The second idea is that the prosecutor can essentially turn any misdemeanor case against almost anyone into a de facto conviction, simply by filing charges and following through long enough with pretrial pressure to wrest a plea out of the accused. These two concepts operating together have resulted in a new policing method, one that relies upon thousands of arrests for trivial offenses, real and imagined.

Ultimately this all comes down to discretion. If they want, the police can arrest you for just about anything.

This constant police pressure is more than a high-volume, high-cost tactical strategy to catch people up in more serious crimes, like holding guns or fleeing outstanding warrants. It’s heavy-duty politics. It puts an entire segment of the population constantly on the defensive, gives it a criminal record essentially in advance, puts everyone in the dragnet up front, so that one false move leads to real time.

Again, the poor have always faced the sharp end of the stick. And the rich have always fought ferociously to protect their privilege, not just in America but everywhere. What’s different now is that these quaint old inequities have become internalized in that “second government”—a vast system of increasingly unmanageable bureaucracies, spanning both the public and the private sectors. These inscrutable, irrational structures, crisscrossing back and forth between the worlds of debt and banking and law enforcement, are growing up organically around the pounding twin impulses that drive modern America: burning hatred of all losers and the poor, and breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich.

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions. Why? Because there’s a direct correlation between need and rights. The more you need, the more you owe, the fewer rights you have. Conversely, the less you need, the more you have, the more of a free citizen you get to be. On the extreme ends of this spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes.

This is the overwhelming narrative of modern American economics, that the individual, particularly the individual without a lot of money, is inherently overmatched. He’s a loser. And if he falls into any part of the machine, he goes straight to the bottom. And then there’s the most disturbing truth of all. People assume that a system that favors the rich likes rich people. This isn’t true. Our bureaucracies respond to the money rich people have, and they bend to the legal might the rich can hire, but they don’t give a damn about rich people.

this is a machine that loves and protects money but somehow hates all people.

If you dig deeply enough in America, the big political swings always have something to do with race.

A suit filed and signed by California attorney general Kamala Harris in the spring of 2013 would make particular note of it. “Defendants, through their agents for service of process,” the state’s complaint read, “falsely state in proofs of service that the consumer was personally served, when in fact he or she was not served at all—a practice known as ‘sewer service.’ ”

Legally, there’s absolutely no difference between a woman on welfare who falsely declares that her boyfriend no longer lives in the home and a bank that uses a robo-signer to cook up a document swearing that he has kept regular records of your credit card account. But morally and politically, they’re worlds apart. When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore.

The only thing that changes is that as the economy stagnates more and more, and the wealth divide gets bigger, it becomes less and less possible for law enforcement to imagine the jail-or-garbage option for the Collateral Consequences crowd, and more and more possible to imagine it for an ever-expanding population of Everyone Else.