This is a "grabber" title for a review of Matt Taibbi's book, "Divide-American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap." For those who want more traditional reviews of this book, that I consider one of the most incisive, erudite, readable and yes, even in a dark way- entertaining books of our day, we have them in abundance: Here they are listed here from right to left: The Wall Street Journal, N.Y. Times and then even an early one here in Dailykos.
I use the Soylent Green analogy, because it struck me in the middle of reading, that in that book of the distopian future, society's useless takers were "only" slaughtered and used as protein for food. For for unfortunate vulnerable group in today's America, their fate could be worse. They feed the wealthy in a different way, by spending most of their lives in jails and prisons with intolerable (but not publicized) conditions, that have doubled over the last few decades even as crime rates have been halved. These now privatized prisons become the source of steady jobs for the towns, and vast profits for investors. Prison guards can do pretty good in some states also, and have no interest in decreasing the numbers of those incarcerated. Soylent Green food for survival, Prison Industrial Complex, food for prosperity.
That science fiction book year of 2022, like our country today was divided between the ultra-rich and the useless, the old, the poor. This includes those whose lives began at the very bottom, usually children born into families with no father, no network of those with secure livable incomes, and immersed into a culture of violence, at home as well on the streets. Taibbi has a knack for just the right personal illustrations of a larger process. Describing a ten year old kid who was snatched up by a police officer in East New York for stoning a abandoned car window, an older observer mentioned how, "when I was a kid they would have taken him home to his mother, now they are written up and they have a record." Thus a criminal identity is formed, which is seen by a harried court system as a presumption that the apprehended is guilty of whatever described by the arresting officer. No time to listen to an explanation, but just take that guilty plea for time served (no explanation of future consequences) and move right along .
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Here's Taibbi's interview with Jon Stewart where he shares his own journey of learning how bad things really are. Here's the second part. While his 400 pages is additive with examples of the rich being immune while the poor don't have a chance, in spite of his detailed explication, his irony; his writing of a book (a very civil act) rather than chaining himself to a federal courthouse, has the inevitable subtle byproduct of "O.K. I wrote it, others have read it, some have shared it with their friends ----- but, we are acknowledging that this is the unchangeable structure of American society in this first part of the 21st century.
Inherently, for those who watch his interview with Stewart, who probably skimmed the book, Tiabbi has to pull his punches. He has to laugh with his jokes and not come off as an angry incensed man, and always wears a whimsical smile. (one comment to Jon in part 2 is that "I see you are already asleep) and this is the problem, that sustaining anger at something so pervasive as what he describes is highly stressful. So, Taibbi sort of explains away why things are like this under Stewart's friendly questions.
Jon brings up the irony of "Moral Hazard" being the reason for not making home owners whole after the sub-prime collapse, yet this hazard disintegrates at the level of the top perpetrators who fomented this. Jon finished by saying "I can't wait to see all the terrible things "they" will say about you, because they will." Actually, after spending the last hour searching for such criticism of his book, including National Review with no review I did find this one from the Weekly Standard, where the reviewer shows no evidence of having read the book and just castigates him for earlier work. I have found no serious substantive refutation of anything facts of this book in any review.
This inane Weekly Standard, had the reviewer read it, could have advanced their anti-Democratic party agenda, since the primary individual that Taibbi attributes responsibility for most of the travesties he describes is none other than William Jefferson Clinton. Clinton unleashed both pincers of this gross attack on justice in our society, and most tragic, as Clinton did this to gain votes from Republican strongholds, Wall Street and anti-black bigots, he won election but deprived this country of a second, populist party.
The root cause of worsening of existence for impoverished African Americans of this book, for me worse than death, is the law the Clinton ran on and signed, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). That law precipitated a change that is profound, that while over the last couple of decades, while crime has halved, allowed our prison population to doubled. It is incarceration in this jails and prisons, where the career of the prisoners has been the result of this "Welfare Reform". Caseworkers who used to attempt to help those in dire need have largely been replaced by "fraud investigators" where any mistake, even by the government agency's overpayment, could lead to jail time and a destroyed life.
It was Clinton, as most of know who ended Glass Stieagall and eliminated or cut funds for monitoring Wall Street companies. His most clear payback was that Goldman Sachs was his largest contributor in 1996. Taibbi is no kinder to our current President and his attorney General. His critique of Holder is interesting, as it points to his long stint as a corporate lawyer, as others in his position have been. He sees that as supporting a common cultural identity to those at the very top of financial firms, so that the very idea of threatening them with real punishment, the sound of gates closing to their life of enjoyment of wealth and family shall never happen. So they manage to insulate these "masters of the universe" from clear responsibility of crimes such as money laundering of sex traffickers and Drug Cartels, and destroying lives of those who thought they were home owners.
And that leads to the ultimate meaning of this book for me, that it shows how the root problem is not who is President or Attorney General, since the attitude that the financial elite are only committing "white collar crimes" has been internalized in our society. Even if the some future idealized administration of a Bernie Sander or Elizabeth Warren would criminally prosecute these "banksters" an individual juror, or appeals majority could find a loophole to save these solid citizens from the kind of pain that only those those who cheat on a few thousand dollars in food stamps deserve.
This is the tragic message of this brilliant book, that brings to mind the sign over Dante's Inferno, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Yet, I can't really do that myself. So I write this Dailykos article that will probably hardly be read. And, I have to continue my local political quests in some form, even though the chances of having any effect are nil. What I have learned is why so few choose to stand up in public to voice objection to what is described here. That which is doable behind a keyboard in the privacy of one's own home takes on a different quality as a sole voice in an official public setting. This explains who anger simmers, for years, decades even, until there is that spark, and then the anger is unfocused, leading to a reaction that only reinforces the original cause of outrage. But I guess this is another diary for another time.
I'll end with my own take on a person defined by this book who after an eye witness identification* in a short trial was convicted, only aided by a harried public defender who just didn't have the resources to mount a meaningful defense. He could do no more than that first lawyer who convinced him to cop a guilty plea and walk free with two months of "time served" because he couldn't raise the thousand dollars bail. It could be that he was really guilty this time of the crime he is now serving life for, but the chain of events, the unwritten laws that made avoiding this existence all but impossible were not of his making. He was born onto a conveyor belt, that we have allowed to be created; its nature made evident for this person the first time a uniformed officer dragged him away in cuffs for throwing stones at a wrecked car in a junk yard.
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* Eye Witness identifications, universally accepted by juries have been shown to have accuracy depending on many variables as low as 30 percent, meaning the vast majority can be false positives.