The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap By Matt Taibbi - book review: Rich pickings in a captivating tale of two Americas - Book review.
In Michael Lewis's latest inevitable bestseller, Flash Boys, Lewis tells the sorry tale of Sergey Aleynikov, a talented programmer who was pretty much the only person on Wall Street to go to prison in the wake of the great crash.
Aleynikov, Lewis reveals, was helped into custody by former employees Goldman Sachs for emailing himself computer code. His sentence was overturned.
Meanwhile, from the Libor scandal of 2012, to HSBC's money-laundering to the many shady deals preceding and following the crash itself – no company has been indicted, merely fined – not least thanks to the infamous 1999 memo from the now US Attorney General Eric Holder warning against prosecuting corporations (later dubbed "too big to jail").
Which is where Matt Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone journalist whose work on the financial crisis spawned some of the best, angriest, journalism of the post-Lehman Brothers era and, of course, his zeitgeisty 2009 description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
His thesis in The Divide is that there are two justice systems. One for the rich and one for the poor and, often, the non-white.
As well as taking us behind the door of the big business – like the lucrative deal to sell parts of an ailing Lehman to Barclays, he takes us to meet immigrant workers sucked up by a Kafkaesque system of semi-privatised justice.
They include a man arrested for standing outside his own house at 1am, another deported to the wrong country and right into the hands of a cartel.
All these people, Taibbi tells us with barely suppressed rage, are picked up and turned over by a US justice system that has monetised criminality, and is thus responsible for a prison/parole population that exceeds that of Stalin's gulags.
And though Taibbi's journalism and passion carry the reader through sometimes dense reporting about financial chicanery, it's the tales from the bottom of the divide that are captivating.
From another review: America, But Not As We Know it, by Richard Bardon.
"It isn't just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside oa 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 HSBC, among many other crimes is caught laundering vast sums for the Sinaloa Cartel, the Mexican drug-terrorist group that with it's 'style of high-volume reprisal killings and public chainsawings and disembowellings walks away with a $1.9 billion fine - less than 10% of it's profit per year - and without a public admission of guilt that would leave it open to civil litigation.
But a young man smoking a hand-rolled cigarette that an undercover policeman mistakes for a joint gets not just arrested but crash-tackled, handcuffed and searched for drugs - and when the cops don't find any they plant an empty crack vial in his hat."
"That UBS, Barclays and a dozen other international banks get caught rigging the London Interbank (LIBOR) on which depends million of trades worth trillions of dollars, every day , and nothing happens.
But when a single mother in Riverside County, California incorrectly fills out a state benefits form, she is convicted of fraud in absentia - and named and shamed in the local newspaper by the local Department of Social Services. An indignity not even inflicted on paedophiles. And the list goes on."
"In July 1776, a small group of bave men declared 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness'.
Reading Matt Taibbi's description of the United States of America of 2014 has confirmed in this reviewer's mind that, were those men returned to Earth today to witness the mockery made of the nation they founded, they would recognise in it all the evils they once took up arms to defeat - the financial and political dominance of Wall Street has turned the USA into a clone of imperial Britain, with it's accompanying divide between it's ruling class and poor masses.
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