Such a landscape, he suggests, brings to mind the last days of the Soviet Union, which operated out of a similar sort of mass hypocrisy until, in 1990 and ‘91, “people were permitted to think about all this and question the unwritten rules out loud, it was like the whole country woke up from a dream, and the system fell apart in a matter of months.” Reason on Taibbi here, including this 2007 interview.Matt Taibbi begins his sixth book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” with a simple formulation: “Poverty goes up Crime goes down Prison population doubles.” It’s a snapshot, a way to represent what Taibbi sees as the through-the-looking-glass reality of contemporary America, where rule of law has been subverted by, on the one hand, corporate greed and, on the other, a kind of institutionalized abuse of the poor. And when most of the population either does not know or does not care that the lowest socioeconomic classes live in something akin to a police state, we should be greatly concerned for the moral health of our society. When swindlers know that their risks will be subsidized, and their potential crimes will be punishable only through negotiated corporate settlements, they will surely commit more crimes. Taibbi doesn't couch it in these terms, his warning is all about moral hazard, in two senses of the phrase. Taibbi maintains, "is a terrible story, and a crazy one." The characterization is typically overwrought, but the general indictment is broadly correct.īut at heart "The Divide" is a face-slap, not a legal brief.
"The cleaving of the country into two completely different states-one a small archipelago of hyperacquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of expendables with only theoretical rights," Mr.
Matt Taibbi's "The Divide" is primarily concerned with the grotesquely unequal application of American justice, between the too-big-to-jail Wall Street elite and the too-poor-to-fight minority underclass. When the polemicist who made Goldman Sachs synonymous with a "vampire squid" writes a book called "The Divide," with a subtitle that references "the wealth gap," one may reasonably anticipate some undergraduate-style fist-shaking about income quintiles and the predatory rich. I had a review out in this weekend's Wall Street Journal about the new book from Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
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