You can read through long stretches of Matt Taibbi’s DIVIDE: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap with little more than an occasional rueful shake of your head—Yep, you might say to yourself, some people get away with just about anything. You can get caught up in the minutiae of white-collar financial crime that Taibbi details, Wall Street chicanery and bizarre legal maneuverings, juxtaposed against the indignities of poor people and people of color being subjected to “stop and frisk” and to warrantless preemptive searches; and again, you can just shake your head, knowing how wrong it all is but also knowing, It’s always been that way, right?
And then Matt Taibbi spells it out in a way that makes you sit up and pay attention:
“You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out how this [double standard] makes sense, financial or otherwise. But it does make sense. It’s just not about money. It’s about fucking with people. It’s the logic of our new shadow government.
“It turns out that we’re too lazy to govern ourselves, so we’ve put society on bureaucratic autopilot—and autopilot turns out to be a steel trap for losers and a greased pipeline to money, power, and impunity for winners.”
What follows is a scathing indictment, from the political Left, of Big Government and its bureaucratic machinery:
“This goes far beyond the oft-quoted liberal cliché about how now have ‘two Americas,’ one for the rich and one for the poor, with different sets of laws and different levels of punishment (or more to the point, nonpunishment) for each. The rich have always gotten breaks and the poor have always had to swim upstream. The new truth is infinitely darker and more twisted.
“The new truth is a sci-fi movie, a dystopia. And in this sci-fi world the issues aren’t justice and injustice, but biology and mortality. We have a giant, meat-grinding bureaucracy that literally alters the physical makeup of its citizens, systematically grinding down the losers into a smaller, meeker, lower race of animal while aggrandizing the winners, making them bigger than life, impervious, super-people.”
Not just our government and our legal system, writes Taibbi, but our entire nation has become
“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 the breathless, abject worship of the rich, even the talentless and undeserving rich. [Emphasis added]
“And because [our system is] fueled by the irrepressibly rising vapor of our darkest hidden values, it attacks people without money, particularly nonwhite people, with a weirdly venomous kind of hatred, treating them like they’re already guilty of something, which of course they are—namely, being that which we’re all afraid of becoming.”
Taibbi describes the American system, circa 2014:
“[T]his is a machine that loves and protects money but somehow hates all people. Of course, this mechanism hates some people more than others. In particular, it hates black people. Again, this is not so much about skin color as it is about culture. There’s a cultural spectrum [our] bureaucracies are attuned to that roughly ranges from black poverty to white wealth. Where you are on that spectrum determines how much of a citizen you get to be.
“Things that are jailable crimes on one end of the spectrum become speeding tickets on the other. We find white people on the jail end and black people on the speeding ticket end, but for the most part…well, for the most part, you know what I mean. That winking understanding we all share about who gets the book thrown at him and who doesn’t, that’s where American racism has gone: unspoken and hidden, but bureaucratized and automated, and therefore more powerful than ever.”
Matt Taibbi sums it up:
[“[For the poor,] the entire world becomes a legal minefield. If you’re poor and on public assistance, just about anything you do that defines you as a living human being can turn into the basis of a fraud case. Getting laid can be fraud. Getting sick can be fraud. Putting your kids in day care can be fraud. Not ‘sounding poor’ can be fraud.
“Our legal system does not make sense. Our legal system is insane…Do we treat people the same way everywhere? How does a poor person end up getting arrested for[welfare] fraud, and does the state have the same playbook for rich people? The obvious answer is no, but you have to see the difference up close, at a day-to-day level, to really grasp the breadth of the gap. When you see, up close, where the awesome power of the American criminal justice space station is directed, you will begin scratching your head, no matter what you think of people on welfare.”
DIVIDE reminds me of nothing so much as Charlie LeDuff’s book DETROIT. Both books reveal how the burden of America’s growing social and economic dysfunction is borne—as always—by the poor and the least equipped to deal with it. Both books make a powerful case that, as Americans complicit in systemic injustice, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Both books demand to be read, and to be taken seriously; people's lives are at stake.
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